CommLog

Career Opportunity

An FYI for our non-client readers: CRA is currently adding to our team of internal communication consultants. If you’re curious about joining the CRA team, view our CareerBuilder job posting here, and learn more about CRA here.

Friendster for Business?

This article from Fast Company, A Little Help from Your Friends, provides some good background on how businesses use, or are thinking about using, social networking technology. (For more background on social networks, check out Alan’s previous post … and for more extensive background on social networking technology, check out Jeff’s previous post.) So how does it work? These programs scan contacts in your address book, appointments in your calendar, and senders and receivers of your email, and then make maps of all the relationships they find among your contacts—and even go so far as to calculate the relationship “strength” based on the frequency with which you interact with the people in your network (we’ll get to that in a second). bq. If it works for romance, why not commerce? A handful of companies have begun using Friendster-style social networking to help businesses and professionals find a perfect match. We're not talking romantic partners here, mind you, but access to previously unreachable customer leads, investors, business partners, job candidates, and employers.

U R Fired: Government Edition

Reuters reports that firing by text message, the growing use of which we've chronicled here and here, has reached the political sphere:

Swaziland's King Mswati fired former Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini last year via a text message on his cellphone, enraged local lawmakers say. ... "If a loyalist Sibusiso could be kicked out so rudely, it says a lot about palace attitudes towards those who serve them," one Mbabane attorney said.

More On Accenture & Outsourcing

I have to comment on the HR survey post by Carolynne below ... at first glance it's good news for internal communication professionals, reading that a recent Accenture HR Services survey of 125 global HR executives and CEOs places employee communications at the top of the ‘we will never outsource’ list. It's bad news, however, if Accenture is the HR consultant du jour in your organization:

David Clinton, president of Accenture HR Services, told HRG today that there was no reason why outsourcers could not deal with communications. In fact, he feels that outsourcers could do a better job and provide a ‘personal touch’: ‘Most of the problem is perception rather than substance. Outsourcers can be just as personal, if not more personal and frankly more professional and more relevant when it comes to employee communications.'

That view frightens me on a number of levels, not all of which will I get into here. Fundamentally, though, it’s because this orientation considers employee communications a set of transactional processes … such as writing, editing, and managing the corporate intranet … and not a set of strategic processes, such as working with leadership to set the corporate agenda, communicating strategy, monitoring and responding to the employee pulse, and most important, acting as counsel to leadership. To serve as a strategic function, though, internal communication has to be at the table as a trusted advisor to leadership, an advisor that fully understands the organization culture and context—something that’s very difficult to do if it’s not a living, breathing, and internal part of the organization. (As a consultant, and hence, "outsourcer," I feel I know of what I type: the greatest challenge to providing good counsel is intimacy with the organization in question, and it's one of the reasons our firm insists on deep work with fewer clients, rather than shallow work with many clients.) The outsource crowd has one thing going for it, though: Our experience is that where internal communication doesn’t add strategic value, leadership ultimately doesn’t see an ROI and indeed takes action--they either hire consultants whom they consider strategists (a short term solution and one from which we benefit on occasion), or they make a more dramatic choice … not to outsource, but to cut.

Outsourcing Employee Communications

Two interesting findings from a recent study of 125 global HR executives: * 87 percent stated that they would never outsource employee communications. * Only 1 percent have fully outsourced their employee communications already. From HR Gateway.

More Proof That Leaders Are Made, Not Born

Interesting piece from HBS Working Knowledge ... "The Leadership Initiative" has created a Great American Business Leaders Database, which contains the names and accomplishments of almost 900 senior executives through the 20th century. Some of the Database can be accessed by the public free of charge. According to the Initiative’s Executive Director Tony Mayo, one of the biggest lessons from the research is the importance of contextual intelligence: “A business leader’s ability to make sense of his or her contextual framework and harness its power often made the difference between success and failure.”

10 Rules For Using Weblogs

MarketingProfs has posted its 10 rules for using blogs and wikis. We’ve posted about blogs quite often, and gave readers a heads up on wikis recently, and this MarketingProfs piece is an addition worth reading. It leads with a premise with which we agree: that more companies get blogs wrong than right. The MarketingProfs example:

To promote a new flavored-milk product called Raging Cow, Dr Pepper/Seven Up had a “cow” post random comments about a cross-country trip. Although the target audience was 18- to 24-year-olds, the comments appealed more to third-graders. A sample: “‘How would a cow know diddly about the phases of the moon?’ Good question, but ever since that whole jumping over the moon incident, we cows and yonder moon have been TIGHT.”

Ugh. The rule I’d most like leaders and internal communication professionals to read is Number 8:

Use blogs for knowledge management: Despite its critics, knowledge management (KM) has not been over-promised; rather, vendors have under-delivered. Blogs can address the gap between KM promise and requirements by letting local expertise emerge. Here’s a good background on blogs and how Lucent is using them in KM. Other companies using blogs effectively include DaimlerChrysler, Hartford Financial Services Group, IBM and ESPN.

For the record, CRA has used blogs for our intranet and KM solutions since 2002.

Condi Rice & Confidence Markers

While most of the world was watching the Condoleeza Rice testimony yesterday for the political discourse, folks in our firm were watching the behavioral discourse, and in particular, the extent to which she projected “confidence markers.” Confidence markers are the relatively small set of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that communicate certainty to an audience. They also strongly contribute to persuasiveness, and they’re well documented in the interpersonal communication literature. What’s important is that they’re all behaviors a speaker can focus on and control, which is why we tell clients confidence isn’t something you feel as much as it’s something you project. So what are the confidence markers? We break them into two groups: verbal and nonverbal. Verbal markers include:

The Cognitive Load Of PowerPoint

While I’m on the topic, it was at another PR weblog worth reading, Greg Brooks’ Engage, that I found this Richard Mayer article on the cognitive load of PowerPoint. Reading the full article requires a free registration, but here’s the gist:

(1) PowerPoint presentations should use both visual and verbal forms of presentation; (2) filling the slides with information will easily overload people’s cognitive systems; and (3) the presentations should help learners to select, organize and integrate presented information.

We agree and encourage you to read it all. We’ve posted about PowerPoint quite often: click here for a summary, and click here for our one-page Principles of PowerPoint primer.

PR Meets The WWW

The focus of CommLog is internal and leadership communication. That said, many of our clients serve (or lead) a PR function as well, and in a nod to that, I’d refer PR-interested readers to Constantin Basturea’s PR blog, PR Meets The WWW. Constantin has also created a PR RSS news aggregator at Blogdigger, which aggregates recent headlines from 30 PR-related weblogs--including CommLog--and is also worth a bookmark. Finally, you might also enjoy reading PR Studies, a PR-related weblog published by the Leeds Business School & Centre for Public Relations Studies.

FDR's First Fireside Chat

In 1999, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Texas A&M University asked 137 leading scholars of American public address to recommend American political speeches on the basis of social and political impact, and rhetorical artistry. From the responses, they compiled a list of the “top 100 American speeches of the 20th century.” It’s a fascinating compilation, and I’ll be highlighting speeches from the list from time to time on this page. Today I’ve selected FDR’s “First Fireside Chat” speech, which you may read here at American Rhetoric’s Online Speech Bank. FDR delivered this speech on 12 March 1933, on the heels of the “banking holiday” he instituted to temper a depression-induced run on U. S. banks. It’s an excellent example of a leader explaining a complex policy decision, its context, and its consequences, in simple terms via a clear and reasonable argument (an example from which every ERP project lead in the world should learn). His introductory paragraphs:

I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking -- to talk with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking, but more particularly with the overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks. I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be. I recognize that the many proclamations from State capitols and from Washington, the legislation, the Treasury regulations, and so forth, couched for the most part in banking and legal terms, ought to be explained for the benefit of the average citizen. I owe this, in particular, because of the fortitude and the good temper with which everybody has accepted the inconvenience and hardships of the banking holiday. And I know that when you understand what we in Washington have been about, I shall continue to have your cooperation as fully as I have had your sympathy and your help during the past week.

After you’ve read the speech, listen to it in its entirety here. Not many people have heard FDR deliver his own rhetoric at length. I found hearing his first Fireside Chat in his own voice a remarkable … and somewhat haunting … experience.

The Office

Around our office, we've been "enjoying" — if that's the right word — The Office, the BBC's darkly comical take on life in a typical business setting. It's full of uncomfortable moments, like this communications "gem" from David Brent, branch manager, discussing impending layoffs:

There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is Neil will be taking over both branches, and some of you will lose your jobs… On a more positive note, the good news is I’ve been promoted — so every cloud… You’re still thinking about the bad news aren’t you?

Dubious Achievements in Employee Communication

From the Billings Gazette:

In her 13 years as a human-resources executive and consultant in San Francisco and Seattle, Cynthia Shapiro has pushed out unwanted employees using a string of methods: setting impossible goals, giving problem workers the clients no one else wants, taking them off a project they love, or surprising them with a bad performance review. Most of the time they quit, never knowing that their exit was orchestrated. "It's an art form, really," Shapiro said matter-of-factly.

What motivates this duplicity? In reality, says the Gazette, fear of lawsuits has relegated the phrase "you're fired" to so-called reality television.

Instead, many companies have adopted more surreptitious ways to get rid of unwanted employees. Human-resources experts call it "managing out," a way to nudge an employee out the door while also minimizing legal exposure.

Read the rest.

HR KPI Trends

For our readers who work in HR functions:

UK companies are becoming more employee-focused, according to research released today by Northgate Information Solutions. In a survey of 50 UK CEOs, 90% said a proportion of their key performance indicators (KPIs) are HR-related, compared with only 37.75% two years ago, in a survey of 200 UK companies carried out by the group in 2002.

There’s also this:

"As time passes, more and more companies are realising the strategic importance of human resources as a business function central to the successful running of the company, rather than seeing personnel departments as administrative centres."

Read more at Online Recruitment.

Email Management

One of the sites linking to CommLog is The Nub out of the UK, which recently posted a brief email management strategy that I found useful. In reading it I recalled our own advice to clients regarding email, which is best summed up in 16 words:

“If an email takes more than two minutes to write, it’s an email you shouldn’t write.”

The fact is, an email that takes more than just a few minutes to write probably involves content better expressed through different media (read: media richness), and as such, you’ll likely be better served making a call, or even better, walking down the hall for a 30 second conversation with the intended recipient. (Exception: emails you must write to document an agreement or conversation; in these cases still have the conversation via phone or face-to-face, but write the email as a confirmation after the fact.) There’s more guidance for email management that this, of course—and here are three items worth reading: * Staples has an article titled Managing Email here, and the author, Jan Jasper, has additional tips here at Business Know-How. * Asset Now has a straight-forward list of email dos and don’ts here. * Online user experience guru Mark Hurst has a free whitepaper titled Managing Incoming Email: What Every User Needs to Know here.

Remembering What It's All About

For our clients in leadership positions, those aspiring to those positions, or those looking to reinvigorate their leaders...a refreshing (and short) column from CIO on The Joy Of Leadership. One snippet... bq. Understanding the company objectives and how your actions affect the results is key to making a strong contribution...How you manage your budget, achieve diversity goals, add to the bench strength of the company through recruitment and development of employees, set and meet productivity goals, and act as a visible, professional representative of the company in external activities—these are all ways to positively impact the company.

LACP Awards

The League of American Communication Professionals has issued their list of winners for their annual Inspire Awards Employee Communications Competition. See them here. Note that there are winners from four business-size classifications, and across a range of categories, including “Most Creative,” “Best Design,” and “Most Engaging.” The conversation around our water cooler conveys dismay that our field still does so much to recognize tactical ability and so little to recognize strategic value. We still offer no awards for categories such as “most valuable to leadership,” “most effective reduction of employee uncertainty,” or “most likely to improve business results.” Until we do, we expect many companies to continue marginalizing (or outsourcing) internal communication professionals during difficult economic times.

With Email Requests, Less Is More

Attention email distribution list users: The more people to whom you send email requests for help or information, the longer it will take to get an adequate response. Why? The “diffusion of responsibility effect”:

the belief, conveyed by verbal or nonverbal communication, that others are capable of helping. Accordingly, if an e-mail sent through a discussion group is evaluated by its recipient as being sent to many individuals that are capable of responding, the diffusion of responsibility effect would imply a decreased tendency to respond.

Read more at Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, who advise managers to “keep their e-mails personalized whenever possible. It's that simple.”